


The Song Beneath Her Skin

by Lassarina



Category: Final Fantasy IV
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-02
Updated: 2011-01-02
Packaged: 2017-10-14 08:24:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/147296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lassarina/pseuds/Lassarina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Edward hears the Eidolons as music beneath her skin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Song Beneath Her Skin

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JackOfNone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JackOfNone/gifts).



"How did you do it?" The question burst out before he could think better of it, and he winced to himself. It was not the most romantic inquiry he could conceive.

"Do what?" Rydia turned on her side and brushed strands of green hair out of her eyes with careless grace.

"I—" For one supposedly skilled at words, he found so few of them now. "Your mother," he eventually said, so quietly his voice was barely audible even to his own ears.

She was silent, and he gripped the twisted edges of the bedsheet hard, lest he stumble again. "I am sorry," he said. "I did not mean—it is only that I still miss them, and I wondered. You seem to have—acclimated."

Rydia considered the question, studying the point where her tumble of hair and his own pale locks had intertwined as though she might find some mystic sigil there. "It's not an easy answer," she said. "I've had more time than you have, remember."

He could not forget. Sometimes when he looked at her, he saw not the woman grown, but the frightened child calling down a power that seemed too large for her small body. It was why he had refused to act on his feelings for Rydia-the-woman for so long; he had struggled to reconcile her with Rydia-the-child of his memories.

"But—is it only time?" Edward absently plucked at the sheets as though they were the strings of his harp.

"Some things can't be reached with shortcuts, Edward." She twined her fingers with his. Her touch was like music, the Eidolons that she bore in her spirit weaving a haunting and alien melody beneath her skin. There, the steady bass beat of Titan's power, in time with her pulse, and mixed with it flowing notes as of a cello that he thought must have been Leviathan. Shiva he thought of as the piercingly sweet notes of a flute, beautiful but distant.

"—like music," Rydia finished, and Edward started with a hint of guilt.

"I'm sorry," he said, "I was—"

"Listening to the Eidolons?" Rydia finished with a faint smile. She had been concerned, the first time he lost himself in the song beneath her skin, but time—always time—had accustomed them both to the way the Eidolons communicated with him, though he was not of their line.

"What's like music?" He dropped his hand from hers, wanting to hear her words and not her power.

"I said that I think for you it would be like music," she said. Her fingertips brushed the calluses that protected his fingers from the harp's wire strings. "It hurts, because you're not used to it, and you're, well, clumsy with it at first. But you get used to playing the notes, and they become familiar, so it doesn't hurt so much to do them—or to think of those who've gone."

Her eyes were distant, and he wondered if she thought of her mother, or remembered Tellah.

"So it's just practice?" he said.

"Look how far you've come already," she said, not quite answering the question. She didn't have to put it into words: _we're here together, and you see me, not Anna._

Edward slid a hand into her hair, and felt more than heard the wild fiddle that was Ramuh and the brassy horns of Ifrit. Her lips curved against his, and when her arms closed around him, her body shifting easily beneath his, he heard the way the Eidolons sang when Rydia was happy.

He buried his memories in the scent of her skin and the alien song of the Feymarch.


End file.
